The People’s World article “Trump’s Nagasaki Day threat of nuclear war must be rejected” was excellent. Thank you.

I suggest that the demand put forth by the editorial board could be strengthened beyond pressing our elected officials to advocate for peace, not war. The concrete specifics in the board’s demand include:

“There should be an offer to North Korea to allow it to trade with other nations and become a part of the global economy in exchange for military arrangements both sides can live with. Certainly a freeze on the North’s nuclear weapons development in exchange for a freeze on U.S. military activity in the South should be on the table.”

This demand does not address what I see as U.S. capitalists’ systemic, destructive, and continuous push for imperialist domination of other nations, and treats the U.S.’s more than 70,000 nuclear warheads and obscene outlay for military expenditures as equivalent to N. Korea’s non-existent (so far) number of nuclear warheads.

Reuters reported in 2011 that N. Korea spent approximately $8 billion for its military that year. “U.S. Government Spending” website reports the U.S. spent $834 billion in 2017 in direct military expenditures, with an additional $13 billion for foreign military aid. This is more than 100 times greater than N. Korea’s expenditure. There is no “equivalence” between US and N. Korean military power or aggressiveness. The USA has been in a state of continuous war literally for generations, effectively since the 1950’s in the aftermath of WWII, attacking publicly or clandestinely Vietnam, Philippines, Cuba, Iraq, Laos, Dominican Republic, Cambodia, Libya, Honduras, Yemen, Nicaragua, Syria, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Pakistan, Iran, Chile, Panama, and many, many others. N. Korea has not attacked any other nation since the end of WWII. The Korean War was a US aggression against Korea fought in Korea, not Korean aggression.

I suggest that here in the USA all people, and in particular communists, consider struggling around the following demands for peace and an end to the Trump Administration’s military threats toward N. Korea, as well ending the related attack on the US working class, people of color, the LGBTQ community, and women that Trump’s proposed transfer of public funds from socially needed programs to the military budget represents:

– Stop the escalating threats against N. Korea immediately

– Withdraw all U.S. and allied troops from S. Korea and end the militarization of the Korean peninsula

– End all sanctions against N. Korea immediately and without preconditions and welcome N. Korea into the community of nations

Great, helpful editorial. A re-vitalization of the peace movement and/or social media mobilization of folks demanding diplomacy, not bombs might turn down the rhetoric in Washington. How ironic 72 years after the U.S. military dropped the first atomic weapons on Japanese civilians, and remains the only country to use weapons of mass destruction, we are on course for another military confrontation which includes a nuclear option.

So Trump’s WORDS are an international threat, but Kim Jong Un’s actual firing of missiles with the stated intent of hitting U.S. soil, engaging nuclear warheads, and now threatening to hit one of our territories is just rhetoric? And no, I don’t think that Trump is helping anything by opening his mouth, but I don’t see the U.S. as the aggressor here.

The U.S. has offered on several occasions to sit down with NK, but THEY are the ones who refused. If you can cite otherwise, I’ll concede.

Uber pays 0.825 per mile to the driver and 0.11/minute for the time. If distance is 21.25 miles and time took to travel is 28 minutes, driver gets paid $20.75 but rider pays $34.23 and Uber receives $11.23 as a service fee and $2.25 for booking fees, which totals $13.48. Driver pays for the gas, dead miles, insurance, cleaning the car, auto service. Uber is a rip off for poor drivers.

I remember decades ago living/working in Minnesota with NO equal jobs law, so I lived in fear that I could be fired for being LGBT, and denied housing too. Yet over in Wisconsin, an enlightened GOP Gov. Lee Dreyfus (former Chancellor of University of Wisconsin) enacted the first Equality Law in the nation for LGBT people (early 1980’s). We truly need national protection, and it is a disgrace that our feds have yet to pass ENDA. Yes, as the saying goes “this GOP is no longer your grandpa’s GOP.” Our former GOP Congressman (out as gay) told me once that he “is glad that he is out of GOP politics because this is a very different, mean-spirited party.” No matter how much Paul Ryan smiles, pretty boy that he is, he remains a devotee of Ayn Rand who views “charity as sin/selfish gain as virtue” (my paraphrasing). I do believe that Ryan is Catholic, but he has no more right to impose his views on “sexual immorality” than does his Pope.